Twitter owner Elon Musk is already facing the heat of his decision of rebranding the name of the social media platform to ‘X’ as it has hit a stumbling block in Indonesia, largest Muslim nation in the world as Jakarta has blocked the platform under online pornography and gambling laws.
According to Russian broadcast network RT, Indonesia has blocked access to the website X.com, chosen by Elon Musk for his rebranded social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The Muslim-majority country’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (Kominfo) said the domain has been associated with illicit content.
“X [dot] com was previously used to host other sites that were not complying with our laws and were included in the Kominfo blocklist,” the ministry’s spokesman, Usman Kansong, told reporters on Tuesday. He did not specify why exactly the domain name was blacklisted.
Indonesia restricted access to video streaming service Netflix from 2016 to 2020, citing the promotion of “negative content such as pornography, LGBT or violence”.
Musk announced on July 24, 2023 that Twitter would change its name and the iconic blue bird logo in favor of a white letter X in a black square. The billionaire, who acquired the platform last year, argued that the style would better suit Twitter’s new functions.
“In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird”, Musk said.
According to Qatar-based broadcast network Al Jazeera, the move means that Indonesians currently cannot access the platform, which reportedly has about 24 million users among the country’s population of 270 million.
“Generally, the ministry blocks websites that are considered to be offensive, criminal or dangerous to social harmony”, Gatria Priyandita, a cyber policy analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Al Jazeera.
Aribowo Sasmito, the co-founder of MAFINDO, a fact-checking group, said he believed X.com has been blocked as the name had negative connotations.
“The name is not too far from XXX, I guess”, Sasmito told Al Jazeera.
Sasmito said Indonesia’s history of blocking risqué online content posed a “dilemma” for internet users in the country.
“Those who prefer freedom are against it but if the context is pornography-related, then it is more related to religious aspects since Indonesia is the country with the largest Muslim population in the world”, he said.
Sasmito, however, said that online censorship did not always succeed in its aims as users could easily get around the curbs.
“This comes with its own challenges. For example, if a domain or URL is blocked, then the site owners will change the address, if they are blocked again then they will just change the name again”, he said.
Meanwhile, according to The Verge, Elon Musk has limited Twitter access for everyone, requiring a verified account to read more than 600 posts per day.
Twitter’s US advertising revenue between April and May 2023 plummeted by 59 percent compared to the previous year.
